


House of Broken Dolls

by orphan_account



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (2010), Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Angst, Blind Character, Blind Jack, Blood and Injury, Gen, Harm to Children, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 22:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1405186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jack start going blind as a kid, he's taken to Berk’s Children Rehabilitation Institute, where he shares a room with Hiccup.</p>
            </blockquote>





	House of Broken Dolls

**Author's Note:**

> Someone asked me at some point to write some Blind AU hijack thing (where Jack is blind), so I wrote a kid fic about that.

_"Curious, Barry the Bunny left the house to investigate the strange sound."_

Jack turned around on his bed. The voice coming from the earphones continued its story. He sighed. Once, he could have read this himself on the pages of a book and he wouldn’t have to wait for the voice to crawl through the story, painfully slow. Maybe it would even have had pictures. But those days were over.

 

Over the past few years, he had seen his world blur around the edges and slowly go dark. When his sight had gotten too bad for him to get around without help, his parents had taken him here, to Berk’s Children Rehabilitation Institute—or the House of Broken Dolls as he liked to call it, since all of the children here were broken in some way—to relearn everything he knew about living. They moved from their tiny town of Burgess to the even tinier town of Berk for this.

They could have gone to the big city, of course, to a place dedicated to teaching blind kids to be blind kids, but his parents had been afraid of taking their poor, helpless son to such a busy, dangerous place as a city. He heard them talk about it several times. They seemed to forget he was going blind, not deaf.

A added weight on the bed followed by a hand tapping his shoulder shook him out of his brooding thoughts. He reached up and removed one of the earphones to listen to what his roommate wanted.

"I’m going to the playroom," Hiccup said. "Are you coming?"

"In a moment."

"Alright…"

The other kid climbed back down from the bed and Jack listened to the uneven sound of his slippered foot and his prosthesis hitting the floor in turns as he limped away. No doubt he would be out of the institute before Jack had even learned to put on his clothes without help. And who was going to help him when Hiccup was gone? He would have to let the doctors dess him. He shuddered.

_"End of Side A. Please turn to Side B."_

Jack groaned and fumbled with the ancient piece of technology to turn the tape around, but he didn’t restart it. Instead, he left the old walkman on the bed and headed to the attached bathroom, to splash some cold water on his face. 

The water was refreshing, but it failed to snap him out of his dark mood. He didn’t know why he had expected it too. It was just water. He shook his hair free of the droplets and made an attempt to comb it with his fingers. He had no idea how it looked. Probably ridiculous. There was a mirror right in front of him, but that didn’t help him.

He reached over the sink to touch the mirror. He ran his fingers over its smooth surface. What use was it to him? The institute could give him a talking watch that would tell him the time if he pressed a button, but not a talking mirror that would tell him if he looked like a fool. He wouldn’t know that until he heard the other children laughing at him.

In a fit of anger, he smashed his fist against the glass. He both felt and heard it shatter under the blow. The sound of glass shards raining down on the bathroom’s counter was satisfying enough that he could ignore the ones lodged in his skin.

His satisfaction was short-lived, however. The staff wouldn’t be pleased. He would have to sit through a condescending lecture about how he should not be reacting in anger. They would tell his parents he was not dealing with his blindness right. Jack sat down in a corner of the bathroom, pulled his knees to his chest and buried his face in them. He stayed there alone in the familiar darkness.

He heard Hiccup’s steps even before he opened the door to their room. Jack didn’t answer when Hiccup called him. He hoped the other kid would assumed he had left. Dread rose in his chest when the familiar steps came closer. The bathroom’s door creaked as it was pushed open all the way. Hiccup gasped.

"Jack! You’re bleeding!"

"I’m fine," he mumbled, only to have the glass shards remind him of their presence in his flesh. He bit down a whine. Hiccup carefully took his wrist and pulled it to him.

"You need to see a doctor."

"I can’t see a doctor. I can’t see anything!" he snapped.

"Alright. Wrong word. Still, you need–"

"I don’t need them."

Hiccup was silent for a few seconds, then got up. Jack thought he was leaving him and could not help but feel hurt. He didn’t want a doctor, but he wanted Hiccup to stay. He was just too prideful to say it.

Hiccup didn’t go far, though. The cabinet’s doors opened and Jack heard some stuff being moved before Hiccup walked back to him and sat on the floor. He opened a metal box. Their first aid kit. The kids at the House of Broken Dolls often hurt themselves, accidentally or not, and the staff kept first aid kits in all of the rooms.

"If you don’t want a doctor to help you, will you at lest let me?"

Jack couldn’t bring himself to answer, but he didn’t stop Hiccup from taking his wrist again. The kid was no nurse and the shards hurt a lot more coming out than they should have, but Jack didn’t mind. He stayed silent though it all, his unseeing eyes fixed on where he knew Hiccup to be.

He had seen the boy, in his early days here, when he was not quite blind yet. He had only been a browned-haired blur and no amount of squinting at him could resolve the features of the bed-ridden kid into anything more precise. That had been maddening. Now, there was nothing at all. But, even if he couldn’t see him, he could feel his soft touch as he wrapped his hand in a bandage as best as he could. And he supposed that was enough.

For the first time since he came to the House of Broken Dolls, Jack smiled.


End file.
